Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3650 1GB

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Introduction

While the average PC enthusiast may gawk endlessly over pages of reviews of high-end power-hungry graphics cards, jaw-slackened by the frame rates and 3DMark score that he or she might find there, at the end of the month it is the low to mid-range card that is purchased most often than not. Price typically comes into consideration, but it's not the only concern. Availability, compatibility, and other issues factor in to a buyers decision as well. Sometimes it simply boils down to the fact that the average Joe clearing stages in Peggle or watching the latest videos on YouTube simply doesn't need all of that horsepower.

AMD's Radeon HD 3650 is one of the few cards out there that can satisfy mainstream user needs yet still cost less that a hundred dollars. Based on the RV635, and off-shoot of the RV670, the HD 3650 is architecturely similar to the more powerful HD 3850 and HD 3870 models, but with a narrower memory interface and far fewer stream processors. It too is built on a 55nm process, requiring less power than previous AMD/ATI cards and, as a result, radiating less heat.

With sales predictions for this card being high, and production costs low, it's almost a no-brainer than many of ATI's partners would look into adding an HD 3650 to their line-up. Diamond Multimedia has, with the release of the Viper Radeon HD 3650 1GB, added not just one but two different variants. The first stuck with default specifications including clock speed and memory buffer, but at launch we hinted that there would be many models to choose from. Today we take a look at their second issue, which raises the total amount of memory to 1GB, but in doing so, uses lower cost, slower GDDR2 chips. In the pages ahead, we'll aim to find out if additional on-board memory really impacts performance more so than a smaller footprint of faster GDDR3 memory.

Sporting an emphasis on keeping costs low, the package contents for Diamond's Viper HD 3650 1GB offers only the card, setup manual and CD, and a single VGA-to-DVI dongle. Again, the target demographic that Diamond's trying to hit probably doesn't need or want a bunch of extra cables or other doo-dads that aren't going to get used, so why bother including them? We were, however, hoping to get a little extra out of the card in the way of overclocking, but all efforts were dead-ended. ATI's Overdrive was functional, but unlocking the utility showed sliders with the lower and upper end both remaining at the default clock of 725MHz for the core, and a paltry 400MHz for the DDR2. Installing ATI Tray Tool initially seemed to help, as a range of speeds was shown to be available, but moving the slider and applying the changes had no effect. Thus, we were left testing our entire suite of benchmarks at the Diamond Viper HD 3650 1GB's default settings.